Family Record

by Patrick Modiano

  “Not at all.”

  “You can maybe start looking around the apartment.”

  “Of course.”

  He walked quickly to the vestibule.

  “Back in a minute . . . Back in a minute . . . Have a look around.”

  The door slammed behind him.

  I found myself alone, in the part of the room where the table stood at which we used to eat our meals. The sun sketched orange stripes on the wood floor. Not a sound. The oxeye window, through which you could see the bedroom, was still there. I remember where the furniture was placed. The two large world globes on either side of the window. Beneath it, the glassed-in bookcase supporting a model galleon. At the foot of the bookcase, a miniature reproduction of one of those cannons used in the Battle of Fontenoy. The two wooden mannequins with their armor and coat of mail, each behind one of the globes. And in front of the model galleon, the saber that had belonged to the Duke of Gloucester. Across the room, in a recess in the wall, was a sofa, and on either side of it were bookshelves: when I used to sit there before dinner and peruse one of the red cloth-covered volumes, I felt as if I was in a train compartment.

  Empty, the room seemed smaller. Or was it my adult eyes bringing it down to size? I moved into the “summer dining room,” a kind of wide corridor with black-and-white-tiled floor, and a bay window through which you could see the rooftops of the Monnaie de Paris and the garden of the neighboring house. The rectangular table with its faux-marble top appeared to me in ghostly superimposition. And the orange leather bench, faded by the sun. And the wallpaper, which depicted a scene from Paul et Virginie. I crossed back through the entrance hall toward the two rooms that overlooked the quay. Someone had ripped out the hallway mirror. I went into what had been my father’s office, and there I felt a deep sadness. No more sofa, no more curtains whose matching fabric was decorated with dark red leaf patterns. No more portrait of Beethoven on the wall, at left, near the door. No more bust of Buffon in the center of the mantelpiece. Nor that scent of chypre and English tobacco.

  Nothing left.

  I climbed the small interior stairway to the fifth floor and entered the room on the right, which my father had turned into a bathroom. The black floor tiles, the fireplace, and the white marble bathtub were still there, but in the room facing the Seine, the sky-blue paneling had disappeared, and I stared at a bare wall. Here and there, it bore traces of wall fabric, remnants of the occupants before my parents, and it occurred to me that if I scraped away these bits of fabric, I’d discover minuscule fragments of still older layers.

  It was nearly eight o’clock, and I began to wonder whether the brilliantined redhead from the agency had forgotten about me. The room was bathed in a dusky light that projected small golden rectangles on the back wall, just like twenty years ago. One of the windows was slightly ajar, and I leaned my elbows on the rail. Very little traffic. A few remaining fishermen at the tip of Ile de la Cité, beneath the heavy foliage of the Vert-Galant garden. A quayside bookseller, whom I recognized by his tall outline and cape—he was already there when I was a child—folded up his canvas chair and headed off slowly toward the Pont des Arts.

  At fifteen, waking up in this room, I would pull open the curtains, and the sunlight, the Saturday strollers, the booksellers unlocking their stalls, the passage of a platform bus, all of it felt reassuring. A day like any other. The catastrophe I dreaded, without quite knowing what it was, had not occurred. I would go down into my father’s office and read the morning papers. He, in his blue bathrobe, was making endless phone calls. He would ask me to come meet him, at the end of the afternoon, in some hotel lobby where he held his appointments. We dined at home. Afterward, we went to see an old film or have a sherbet, on summer evenings, on the sidewalk of the Ruc-Univers. Sometimes the two of us stayed in his office, listening to records or playing chess, and he would scratch the top of his scalp with his index finger before moving a pawn. He walked me to my room and smoked a last cigarette while telling me about his “projects.”

  And like the successive layers of paper and fabric that covered the walls, that apartment evoked still more distant memories: the several years that matter so deeply to me, even though they precede my birth. At the end of a day in June 1942, in a dusk as mild as today’s, a pedicab stops, downstairs, in the narrow byway off Quai de Conti between the Monnaie and the Institut de France. A young woman gets out of the pedicab. It’s my mother. She has just arrived in Paris on the train from Belgium.

  I remembered that between the two windows, near the bookshelves, there was a writing desk whose drawers I would explore when I lived in that room. Among the old cigarette lighters, cheap necklaces, and keys that no longer opened any doors—what doors had they opened?—I had come across small datebooks from the years 1942, 1943, and 1944, which belonged to my mother and which I’ve since misplaced. Having leafed through them so often, I knew by heart all the brief notes she had jotted in there. Such as, one day in the autumn of 1942: “Toddie Werner’s—Rue Scheffer.”

  It was there that she first met my father. A girlfriend had dragged her to that apartment on Rue Scheffer, occupied by two young women: Toddie Werner, a German Jew living there under an assumed identity, and her friend, a certain Liselotte, also German, married to an Englishman whom she was trying to free from the camp in Saint-Denis. That evening, about a dozen guests were gathered on Rue Scheffer. They talked, listened to music, and the drawn curtains required by “passive defense” made for an even more intimate mood. My mother and father were talking. Everyone who was there with them, and who could have borne witness to their first meeting and to that evening, is now gone.

  Leaving Rue Scheffer, my father and Geza Pellmont wanted to go visit Koromindé on Rue de la Pompe. They invited my mother along. They climbed into Pellmont’s Ford. He was a Swiss citizen and had obtained a travel pass. My father often said that when he sat in Pellmont’s Ford, he had the illusion he couldn’t be touched by the Gestapo or the inspectors from Rue Greffulhe, because that car was, in a sense, a bit of Swiss territory. But the Milice requisitioned it not long afterward, and it was in that Ford that they assassinated Georges Mandel.

  At Koromindé’s, they let the curfew hour slide by, and they stayed there, chatting, until dawn.

  In the following weeks, my father and mother got to know each other better. They often arranged to meet in a small Russian restaurant on Rue Faustin-Hélie. At first, he didn’t dare tell my mother that he was Jewish. Since arriving in Paris, she had been working for the dubbing department of Continental Films, a German production company located on the Champs-Elysées. He was hiding out in a riding academy in the Bois de Boulogne, where the instructor was a childhood friend of his.

  Yesterday, we walked, my little daughter and I, in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, and by chance we arrived at the edge of that riding academy. Thirty-three years had passed. The brick buildings of the stables where my father took refuge had surely not changed since then, nor had the hurdles, the white barriers, the black sand of the bridle path. Why here, more than any other place, did I smell the venomous odor of the Occupation, the compost from which I emerged?

  Troubled times. Unexpected encounters. By what twist of fate did my parents spend New Year’s Eve 1942 at the Beaulieu, in the company of the actor Sessue Hayakawa and his wife, Flo Nardus? A photo lay at the bottom of the drawer in the writing desk, which showed the four of them seated at a table, Sessue Hayakawa, as stone-faced as in Gambling Hell; Flo Nardus, so blonde that her hair looks white; my mother and father, looking like two timid youngsters . . . That evening, Lucienne Boyer was headlining at the Beaulieu, and just before they announced the New Year, she sang a song forbidden because one of its composers was Jewish:

  Speak to me of love

  Tell me again

  Those tender words . . .

  Sessue Hayakawa has since passed away. What was that Japanese former Hollywood star doing in Paris under the Occupation? He and Flo Nardus lived at 14 Rue Chalgrin in a smal
l house at the back of a courtyard, where my father and mother often visited. Nearby, on Rue Le Sueur—the first street on the right—Dr. Petiot was incinerating the bodies of his victims. In the ground-floor studio, with its twisted columns, dark paneling, and cathedras, Sessue Hayakawa greeted my parents in a “battle” kimono. Flo Nardus’s blondness was even more unreal next to that samurai. She tended to the complicated flowers and plants that gradually invaded the studio. She also raised lizards. She had spent her childhood and adolescence in Tunisia, at El Marsa, in a pink marble villa owned by her father, a Dutch painter. And it was in Tunisia that I met her in July 1976. I’d learned that she had settled in that country some time before, like people who return to their birthplace.

  I called her on the phone and told her my name. After more than thirty years, she still remembered my parents. We set a date for Thursday, July 8, at 6 p.m., at the Tunisia Palace on Avenue de Carthage.

  The hotel must have had its heyday under the Protectorate, but now the lobby, with its few chairs and bare walls, looked abandoned. Near me sat a fat man in a very tight black suit who jiggled an amber necklace in his right hand. Someone came to greet him, calling him Hadji.

  I thought about my parents. I was certain that, if I wanted to meet witnesses and friends from their youth, it would always be in places like this: disused hotel lobbies in far-off countries, over which floated a scent of exile, harboring creatures who had never had a home base or defined civil status. While waiting for Flo Nardus, I felt the gentle, furtive presence of my father and mother next to me. I saw her enter and recognized her immediately. I stood up and waved. She was wearing a pink turban, a blouse of the same color, slacks, and tattered espadrilles. Around her waist was a belt made of bits of orange glass and shards of mirror strung together with silver wire. She was still the woman in the photo. Her profile was very smooth and her eyes forget-me-not blue.

  I surprised her by talking about the past. She herself didn’t recall too many details. Then, little by little, her memory cleared and it was as if she were giving me back a very old magnetic tape that had been forgotten in a drawer.

  She remembered that my father had hidden for a month at 14 Rue Chalgrin, not daring to leave the house because he had no papers and was afraid of roundups. Sessue Hayakawa’s papers weren’t in order, either. The Germans didn’t know that this Japanese had an American passport, and the Japanese wanted to draft him. In the evening, my father, Sessue, and she played dominos to take their minds off their troubles, or else my father helped Sessue rehearse his role in Patrouille Blanche, a film he was in, directed by Christian Chamborant. My father was an old friend. He had been a witness at her and Sessue’s wedding, in 1940, at the Japanese consulate. Yes, she recalled that evening at the Beaulieu, but they had gotten together a week before that, at 14 Rue Chalgrin, to celebrate Christmas: my father, my mother, Toddie Werner, Koromindé, Pellmont, all the others . . .

  We were the only ones left in the lobby. The sounds of cars and horns drifted in from the street, and we sat there, talking about a past that had brought us together but that was so far distant it had lost all reality.

  We left the hotel and followed Avenue Bourguiba. Night was falling. Hundreds of birds hidden in the leaves of the trees on the median strip cheeped in a deafening concert. I leaned closer to hear what she was saying. In the past thirty years, she had known her share of hardships. They had arrested her at the Liberation, accusing her of being a “Kraut spy,” but she had managed to escape from Tourelles prison. Already during the Phony War, when she and Hayakawa lived on Rue de Saussure, in the Batignolles neighborhood, the locals accused them of being “Fifth Columnists.”

  Sessue had returned to America. He had died. She had lost her father. They had impounded her childhood villa in El Marsa. She lived in a room in the Medina, and to get by she made little glass animals: reptiles, fish, birds. Painstaking work. She cut pieces of glass, fitted them together, and bound them with wire. Someday, if I liked, she would show me her animals. We’d have to meet earlier and we’d walk to her home on Rue Sidi-Zahmoul. But this evening it was too late, and I’d risk getting lost on the way back. I accompanied her to Porte de France. She walked down one of the alleys with an indolent, graceful step and I gazed after her silhouette amid the cloth, perfume, and jewelry merchants taking down their stalls. She waved to me one last time before being lost in the crowd of souks. With her, it was a bit of my parents’ youth drifting away.

  I’ve kept a photo of such small dimensions that I scrutinize it under a loupe to see the details. They’re sitting side by side, on the living room sofa, my mother with a book in her right hand, her left hand resting on my father’s shoulder as he leans forward to pet a large black dog whose breed I can’t make out. My mother is wearing a curious striped blouse with long sleeves; her blond hair falls to her shoulders. My father is wearing a light-colored suit. With his brown hair and pencil mustache, he looks like the American aviator Howard Hughes. Who could have taken that picture, one evening during the Occupation? Without that period, and the random, incongruous meetings it brought about, I would never have been born. Evenings when my mother, in the fifth-floor bedroom, read or looked out the window. Downstairs, the front door closed with a metallic thud. It was my father returning from his obscure errands. The two of them dined together, in the summer dining room on the fourth floor. Then they went into the living room, which served as my father’s office. There, they had to shut the curtains, because of passive defense. They listened to the radio, probably, and my mother clumsily typed up the subtitles she had to deliver to Continental Films every week. My father read Bodies and Souls by Van der Meersch or the Memoirs of Prince von Bülow. They talked, made plans. Often laughed uproariously.

  One evening, they had gone to the Mathurins to see a drama called Solness the Builder and had run out of the theater doubled over. They couldn’t contain their laughter. They howled with laughter all the way down the sidewalk, right near Rue Greffulhe, where policemen stood who wanted my father dead. Sometimes, when they had drawn the curtains in the living room and the silence was so complete that they could hear a carriage passing by or the rustle of trees on the quay, I imagine my father felt a vague disquiet. Fear overcame him, like on one late afternoon in the summer of ’43. There was a downpour and he was beneath the arcades of Rue de Rivoli. People waited in compact groups for the rain to stop. And the arcades grew darker and darker. A climate of expectancy, of suspended movement, the kind that preceded police roundups. He didn’t dare mention his anxiety. He and my mother were two rootless souls, with no attachments of any kind; two butterflies in the darkness of Occupied Paris, when one could so easily pass from shadows to too harsh a light, and from light to shadow. One day, at dawn, the telephone rang and an unknown voice asked for my father by his real name. They hung up immediately. That was the day he decided to flee Paris . . . I had sat down between the two windows, at the foot of the shelving. Darkness had invaded the room. Back then, the telephone used to be on the writing desk, easily at hand. It seemed, after thirty years, that I could still hear that shrill, half-muffled ringing.

  I still hear it.

  The front door slammed. Footsteps on the interior stairs. Someone came closer.

  “Where are you? Are you there?”

  The real estate man, the brilliantined redhead . . . I recognized the effluvia of Roja that he left in his wake.

  I stood up. He stretched out his hand.

  “Forgive me. I was gone a long time.”

  He was relieved. He had found his briefcase. He joined me at one of the windows.

  “Were you able to look around the apartment? You can’t see a thing now. I should have brought a flashlight.”

  At that instant, the tour boat appeared. It glided toward the tip of the island, its garland of searchlights aimed at the building façades along the quays. The walls of the room were suddenly covered in spots, dots of light, lattice patterns that spun around and vanished into the ceiling. In that same room
, twenty years earlier, the same fleeting, familiar shadows had captivated my brother Rudy and me, when we turned off our lamp as the same boat passed by.

  They must have been celebrating something that evening. The Louvre, the Vert-Galant garden, and the statue of Henri IV on the Pont-Neuf were all lit up.

  “What do you think of that view?” the brilliantined redhead asked, in a faint but triumphant voice. “It’s really something, isn’t it? Eh?”

  I didn’t know what to answer. In 1945, one evening in May, the quays and the Louvre were lit up just like this. A crowd had swarmed onto the banks of the Seine and the Vert-Galant garden. Below, in the byway off Quai de Conti, a dance party had spontaneously broken out.

  They played the “Marseillaise” and the “Valse brune.” My mother, leaning on the balcony, watched the people dancing. I would be born in July. My father, too, was somewhere amid that crowd celebrating the first night of peace. The day before, he had left on a train with Pellmont, as they had discovered the Ford in the back of a shed, near Narbonne. The back seat was smeared with blood.

  XV

  A taxi was parked at the corner of Rue Gambetta and Rue de France. I hesitated before opening the door because a man was sitting next to the driver, but he nodded that the car was free.

  My wife and I took seats in back, and in my arms I carried my daughter, who had just turned one year old. I was thirty and four months, and my wife would soon be twenty-five.

  We placed the navy-blue stroller between us. The man sitting in front, to the driver’s right, didn’t move. I finally said:

  “We’re going to Cimiez, the Arenas.”

  The driver started up slowly. He was a fellow about my age, as was his neighbor.

  “Problem with the distributor . . .”

  “Even in a diesel?”

  “I should go see your brother . . .”

  “He’s not at the Greuze garage anymore.”